1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of information technology, and more particularly relates to high performance, enterprise-level backup and disaster recovery systems, and the use of virtualization technology in this field to provide additional advantages and benefits.
2. Description of Related Art
The state of the art in backup and disaster recovery technology is described in the references listed in the companion patent application referenced and incorporated by reference above.
Examples of systems providing virtualization services include, for example: VMWare (www.vmware.com); Microsoft Virtual Server (www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/virtualserver/default.mspx); and Xen-(www.xensource.com).
There has been some use in the prior art of virtualization technology in enterprise-level backup and disaster recovery operations.
For example, widely used virtualization servers, such as those cited above, all include the ability to create and save virtual machines by creating a new (empty) virtual machine “shell”; installing an operating system in a new virtual machine; installing applications into the new virtual system; and copying existing data for those applications for other virtual or real (i.e., physical) machines.
In addition, it is known to install backup client software on a virtual machine and to restore to the virtual machine a backup set, including the state of the processor and peripheral devices, created from a real machine. See Traut, U.S. Patent Publication No. US 2006/085792 A1 (Apr. 20, 2006). However, this is no different operationally than restoring to a real machine.
In addition, the virtualization software may provide the ability to import data from third-party backup formats. See “Importing Virtual Machines and System Images from Other Formats” (www.vmware.com/support/ws55/doc/ws_newguest_vm_importer.html). Again, this is fundamentally the same type of “import” operation as might be performed when importing a foreign backup format in restoring data to a real machine.
The prior art does not provide any process for backing up a real machine in such a manner that the entire machine may be recreated, from the backup image, as it existed at a specified point in time, in a virtualization environment, under a virtualization server.